COLOMBIA – There is a story that Carl and Mary Brown’s adopted children love to tell.
At any moment, sweets and candies were hidden throughout the Elgin residence, creating an irresistible treasure hunt for their food. Once discovered, the hideout would be relocated.
It was an improvised game that also revealed to these young people with a disturbing past the innate kindness and loving nature of the family.
“They showed me who God is only through their actions,” said Mackenzie Brown, now 23, in a video in honor of the 2016 couple, who for more than 44 years took care of more than 200 children and ran the South Carolina Foster Parent Association away from home.
Mackenzie was one of six children adopted by the Browns, in addition to three biological children.
“It was the best thing we’ve ever done. It has become part of our lives, almost our entire life,” Carl Brown told The Sumter Item in a 2018 profile. He died on February 26 at the age of 81.
The path towards the calling began in the early 1970s, when they raised brothers who would be their first adoptions.
Enid Jenkins, director of the state’s Department of Social Services’ Lowcountry region, said Brown was one of the biggest advocates of the temporary foster home the state has ever known.
“Carl has always been an example man. He didn’t just talk about it, he actually took care of children for years and even adopted children from the system, ”said Jenkins. “Carl wanted to help do what was necessary to keep children in the least restrictive environment possible, so this is a tremendous loss for us.”
Named “Angels in Adoption” by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute in 2014, the Browns entered state policy when necessary. In 2018, they supported a measure sanctioned by Governor Henry McMaster that gave adoptees aged 18 or older access to their birth certificates.
Brown’s work was not limited to South Carolina. In 1987, while serving as vice president of the International Association of Foster Parents, he testified before a Florida State House panel that he was exploring how to solve the homelessness problem for foster children there.
“We need to recognize that adoptive parents are professional parents,” said Brown, according to an article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. “We tend to treat these houses as a cheap hotel.”
McMaster appointed Brown to a 2018 advisory panel that recommended hiring Michael Leach to administer the DSS, which McMaster did.
State Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, served with Brown on that committee.
“Carl and Mary worked tirelessly with the Adoptive Parents Association and changed the lives of many children. Carl will be sorely missed by many who knew him and the many children he brought home, ”Shealy told the Post and Courier in a statement.
One was Christopher Brown, another of his adopted children, who said that growing up under the Browns’ roof not only gave him a sense of personal worth, but instilled in him what it means to be a family.
“Going through these doors, for us to grow up here and move, it changes you. It is not like growing up in a normal home. You learn that there is a definition of family that goes beyond just blood, ”he said in that video tribute.
Jenkins said the state’s host community was shaken by Brown’s unexpected death, but the legacy he built will continue through the hundreds of professional development and training courses he offered to prospective adoptive parents.
As of January 1, about 3,937 children were in foster homes across the state, and more than 2,300 family placements were required, according to data from the DSS.
“It opened up a whole new world for some of our older adults, who realized that they still had something they could give their child. I just can’t believe Carl Brown is gone, ”said Jenkins. “But when you have done all the work for which God has called you, he will touch you and say: ‘feel yourself a servant, work well done’. It was Carl. “
Follow Adam Benson on Twitter @ AdamNewshound12.